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ESPN has announced its UK channel will air a nightly highlights programme from the Open Championship, which starts on Thursday (July 15).

ESPN and ESPN HD will broadcast the hour-long show, The Open Highlights, from 11pm every night from Thursday to Sunday (July 18).

The deal marks the first foray into golf for ESPN’s UK channel, which will also offer a one-hour preview show at 11pm on Wednesday (July 14).

“We dug a bit more into the golf properties here [in the UK] and we found a package of TV highlights rights for pay-television which as far as we’ve been able to research has not ever been shown on pay-TV,” Jeroen Oerlemans, vice-president of TV channels for ESPN’s Europe, Middle East and African operations told the Press Association.

“We thought it was a great opportunity to build on the locally relevant programming that we already have on our UK channel. What is more British than the Open? We will look to continue to build our golf programming in the UK as part of our commitment to building a channel with a wide variety of sport.”

ESPN entered the UK market by signing a deal to show Premier League football but Oerlemans believes that “locally relevant” content such as The Open is of the “utmost importance” for a premium sports channel attempting to establish itself for years to come.

“We started with the pinnacle of sports here, Premier League football, but you can’t just rely on that,” he added. “You need to add to that content and look at every deal very carefully to ensure that it makes commercial sense. It’s easy to throw money at properties and hope that it works for you from a commercial point of view.”